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Thursday, December 15, 2005

The false arch druid

Tonight a friend whispered Agirra on Argent Dawn, and suddenly I was part of a 40 man raid group. The goal was to kill a faction leader, Archdruid Staghelm, in Teldrassil. That is deep in Alliance country, and not exactly an easy place to get in. A few players had managed to sneak in and find a quiet place to wait. They summoned the rest until the whole group was in. Then they snuck into position, pulled the Archdruid to where the main force was waiting, and started killing. It was intense, quick, and then out before the Alliance could get in and do something about it. The Onyx Ascendancy, who were filling out most spots in the raid, posted the story about the event. Afterwards there were celebrations in Orgrimmar, and a group photo outside:

3 comments:

This is so long ago, but still warms my heart as I remember it. It was the first killing of a faction leader on our server, and one of the first in the world. A feat no-one managed to replicate, even years after our alpha strike. The planning took weeks of effort and a lot of time on my part running around in enemy territory being killed, all in the name of scouting.

You know me as Brayloud, the player who organised that event and then later the 40 hunter attempt on Onyxia. I've been quiet of late, not even playing games in the last year....but that's partly because I am now writing my own game.

Hello Ivan, or should I say Brayloud! Nice to hear from you, and I love to have your comment to this. I should have known the brain behind the Staghelm kill was also behind the 40 hunters on Onyxia. Epic achievements, those, long before "achievement" was a known word.

I am very grateful to the people on Argent Dawn, so much creativity and gaming skill on one server, it really taught me a lot about games and gaming. Now I am curious as to your own game. :)

Argent Dawn was an amazing server with a lot of really good guilds. It was a crucible of creativity - and I've not seen the like of the place since.

I'm actually working on two games currently. One is set in the stone age and is a simple PVP game.

http://mountainwheel.com/games/stonerage/

We hope to have this playable within the year. A lot of the graphics and environmental work is done, so the focus is on the programming (my corner) and animations / characters.

I'm working with an online virtual indie company on this project. There's no pay but it does provide an excellent environment to learn and progress within a new sector as well as to meet new people who love gaming.

The second project will leverage what I learn from the first project and will similarly be built with the CryEngine.

http://cryengine.com/

This combines story-telling elements with a system that will be designed to allow end players a level of control and story telling of their own that has never been seen before.

While RPG will be at the heart of the game I plan to throw out many of the tropes of this genre. Gameplay will be highly focused on much smaller groups, indeed, just a few guilds the size of The Onyx Ascendancy will be the target within each zone. Within each 'realm' I would expect there to be perhaps 8-12 major guilds and a handful of smaller ones - bringing back a community feel to the gaming. I'm dubbing the gamestyle TMO (Tiny Multiplayer Online).

Overall gameplay focus will be on sandbox, allowing the players the freedom to determine how they spend their time in the game as well as how much time.

The plan is to build a set of toolkits that will allow others to build their own worlds in addition to the one I will build for myself. Once a basic sandbox world has been constructed it will be up to the players as to how it develops from there. They will be free to build their own towns, housing, farms, lumber mills and the like.

I'm tossing out the 'Skinner Box' along with it's repellent time sinks and endless meaningless achievements and repeatable daily quests / grind. Gaming has gone from being an enjoyable and creative way to spend some time into an endless grind designed to keep you subscribed in order to bolster a companies end of year financials.

The project is huge, and I fully expect it to take the next five years of my life. It will come out in phases, each building on the last - starting with something truly simple, like player housing and a resource management game with no goals other than sculpting the world to your liking. Each player will be able to host their own world and invite their friends to visit and view what they've built. It will be social oriented, not goal oriented.

From there, more traditional elements will start to appear until several years down the track we will have a fully fledged toolkit for creating and telling your own stories...oh, and you can just smash stuff with an axe if that's also your thing :D

More information is available about my ideas within the wiki I use to gather my thoughts.

http://shattered-screens.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

It's a total mess, because a lot of it is stuff that occurs to me and is scribbled down quickly before the idea fades. Feel free to have a romp through it and see what my mind has been up to ^^

About Me

This is the journal of Torill Elvira Mortensen. I am an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. The topics of my writings here are among other things media studies, reader-response theory, role-play games, Internet Culture, travel, academic weirdness and online communication - put together at random.
Google scholar page.

Personal Publication and Public Attention, Torill Elvira Mortensen (2004): "Personal Publication and Public attention", in Gurak, Laura, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman (ed): Into the Blogosphere; Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/, University of Minnesota.

Pleasures of the Player (pdf), Torill Elvira Mortensen (2003): Pleasures of the Player; Flow and control in online games, Doctoral Dissertation Volda College and University of Bergen.

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The Gamers' Space

The Gamers' Space is a small project I am doing in the spring 2009. It includes an electronic survey, pictures of game machines of different kinds, and interviews done at The Gathering, a large LAN party in Hamar, Norway. For participation, more information, links and addresses, check The Gamers' Space.